Guild Wars 2:Review in Progress

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Keep checking back for regular updates on ArenaNet’s new fantasy MMO as we play for review.

By Charles Onyett

No more stress tests or beta weekends, Guild Wars 2 is officially live. Throughout the coming weeks as I check out the launch version for review, I’ll post text and video updates during the work week, showing off how my Norn Guardian is progressing as I level through the 1 – 80 content, take part in World versus World battles and jump into PvP arenas. If you're completely new to the game and have no idea what Guild Wars 2 is or what's going on, check out this starter guide to get a sense of the basics.

Experience for Everything

Whether I was picking blueberries out of bushes or hacking at the frigid body of a maelstrom-summoning, zone-threatening snow demon, I was earning experience toward leveling my Norn Guardian. The experience rewards for doing nearly everything in the game made it feel like there was little time wasted while playing Guild Wars 2, lending significance to even minor activities, and contributing to a sense that no matter what I did, I was always getting stronger and working toward unlocking more gameplay options for my class.

The amount of experience handed out shows how ArenaNet wants people to play. Killing standard monsters results in very small experience gains. It makes no sense to sit there and try to round up and slay packs of mobs. Instead, the big chunks of experience come through events and story quests, emphasizing participation in structured content instead of rewarding those willing to put up with tedious grinding.

Quests come in various types, and from what I’ve played so far, at level 19, not all are equally entertaining. Scattered around zones are NPCs represented by hearts, all with unique lists of objectives. You don’t necessarily have to complete their tasks, though the financial rewards for doing so make questing for the heart NPCs seem worthwhile. And after their demands have been met, they’ll sell items, some of which can be powerful. Sometimes the tasks are fairly straightforward: just kill a bunch of stuff around the NPC. Sometimes they’re goofy enough to be entertaining, like bottling worms and fireflies or protecting baby animals, but at other times the tasks, particularly those that emphasize fetching and collecting, are too safe and conventional to be memorable.

Thankfully they’re over quickly, so it’s never long until there’s something new to play with. Events are the real highlight of the main leveling content so far. These quests start up periodically around each zone and can be undertaken by anyone in the area. There’s no quest log to manage and no need to join a group and make sure everyone’s on the right quest stage. If a convoy needs protection or a friendly faction is mounting an assault on an enemy encampment, you can jump in and start fighting at any point. Your contribution is taken into account and you’re given substantial rewards.

This makes it feel like Guild Wars 2’s world isn’t a static funhouse waiting for you to show up in order for all the lights to brighten and music to start playing. It makes it feel like the world has its own rhythms and that it exists independent of your presence, which in some ways helps defeat the inherent artificiality of the experience. Of course, that sense of artificiality is reestablished after an event re-triggers for the fifth time, but at least on the initial journey, it’s a powerful motivator, and a big reason to keep looking around the world, earning rewards while learning how the inhabitants of this incredibly detailed world interact.

The events represent the best storytelling in Guild Wars 2 from what I’ve seen so far, skillfully mixing gameplay with just enough dialogue to establish context and add a layer of personality. Sometimes the storylines can be serious, where characters strive to stop potentially catastrophic events, and sometimes they can be comedic, like when a scientist asks you to protect cattle from invaders so he can launch them through the air as part of an experiment. So far the variety of tasks has been really impressive, and in some cases even affects which faction controls settlements. The fact that ownership of territory in the virtual world can shift like this helps lend more significance to events, because their outcomes can have very noticeable effects on the game world. I’m looking forward to seeing how these systems develop in later zones.

The personal story quests so far haven’t been quite as exciting for me, as many of the characters feel like stale, brittle fantasy stereotypes. The stories are all very well presented, with plenty of fancy visuals and fully voiced dialogue, but so far nobody’s had anything terribly interesting to say. Perhaps that’s still because I’m early in the game, though, and later on things will become more exciting. Dull characters aside, the goals for each quest are well done, adding even more variety to the experience, tossing me into in one-on-one brawls in front of a cheering audience and phasing me into mystical planes of existence to recover trapped spirits.

So far, the shortcomings of the story quests and heart NPC tasks haven’t sucked out the fun of exploring Guild Wars 2. It’s a stunning world, beautifully crafted, and the diversity of gameplay styles possible even within a single class’ skill set is really impressive. The pace is fast, travel around the world is conveniently linked by instant-travel waypoints, so there’s rarely any downtime. It feels like Guild Wars 2 really lets me get to the fun parts without much of the tedious fuss normally found in MMOs.

Still, these are only really my first steps into the game. Group dungeons aren’t accessible until later in the leveling progression, I’ve barely looked at World versus World combat or the PvP arenas, and I’m still learning how the crafting system works and unlocking new skills for my Guardian. I’ll post many more updates in the coming weeks covering all these aspects before a final review is ready. But so far, Guild Wars 2 is a lot of fun.

Mix and Match

There’s no dedicated healing class in Guild Wars 2. There’s no class you can point to and label as the permanent tank or permanent damage dealer. Every class does a little bit of everything. Combat seems to be more about movement and buff / debuff management than spike healing and aggro capture.

Without the clarity of strictly defined class roles, ArenaNet tried to prevent the skill system from getting too complicated by giving each weapon a set of fixed skills. When I equip my Guardian with a one-handed mace, I get three unique attacks, and can fill in the other two weapon slots on my skill bar with an off-hand. That means I can use a mace with a torch, a mace with a focus, or a mace with a shield. The three mace skills will always be the same for the Guardian, but the other skills will change depending on the equipped off-hand, altering my role in a fight.

By fixing skills to weapons, ArenaNet essentially created subclasses for my Guardian. As you might expect, a shield is based more around defensive skills, and lets me protect allies and knock back enemies. A one-handed mace's skills provides a number of healing and defensive bonuses, making it a good choice for more survivability while fighting enemies at melee range. If I want to deal more damage, I can swap in a one-handed sword for the mace. If i want to deal even more damage, I can replace the shield with a torch so my Guardian can breathe fire and launch fireballs like a caster.

There’s a lot of versatility to the system, even with the pre-made skill loadouts of the weapons. By equipping a two-handed sword the Guardian becomes a much more mobile damage-dealer, capable of leaping at targets and dealing heavy damage across a large area by spinning his blade. A two-handed mace gives the Guardian powerful crowd control, letting him encircle himself with magic barriers that enemies can’t cross and blast foes with lines of immobilizing energy.

Weapon skills only take up half the skill bar, though. The other five slots can be occupied with a healing skill, three utility skills and one elite skill. Every class must equip a heal, so there’s no way to equip only damage-dealing skills. Once you’ve unlocked an assortment of utility skills, you can slot them individually – they don’t come in pre-set packs like the weapon skills – so there’s more freedom to customize, and it prompts interesting questions. Should I equip all spirit weapon summons so my Guardian can run around with a floating mace, sword and bow following along? Should I equip area of effect fire blasts or energy walls that block incoming projectiles? There’s a huge amount depth to the system, and so far experimenting with all the different possible combinations has been a lot of fun.

It takes a while to unlock all the skill slots and even longer to accumulate enough skill points to purchase all the utility, elite and healing skills. As a result, I haven’t so far felt overwhelmed as new things are introduced. I’m currently still looking over the Trait system, which provides passive bonuses to support specific play styles. For instance, I can use Trait points, gained while leveling, to increase the length of time my spirit weapons stay active, as well as reduce their cooldown rates. Like the weapon and slots skills, I can also swap around major trait bonuses that I’ve unlocked too, so if I later decide spirit weapons aren’t useful any more, I can add in different bonuses that augment different skills. It’s an extremely flexible system, letting me experiment and adjust instead of locking me into a specific role.

So even though I’m a heavy armor-wearing, giant weapon-using combatant, I can actually adjust my skills so I’m more of a caster type, crowd control type, or healer type, or even a summoner. I love that there’s this much freedom of choice within the class, and assume it has a lot to do with trying to stay alive in the dungeon encounters I still haven’t arrived at yet.

The diversity between classes is also impressive. Even though every class can do so many things, each seems to retain a sense of identity from what I’ve seen so far. The Mesmer’s ability to copy himself and command his images sets him far apart from the quick-hitting Thief, while classes like the Necromancer and Ranger rely more on pets to stay alive while questing along and to help out in group fights.

One complaint I do have so far is that, despite the obvious depth in each class, it’s tough to know exactly what kind of an effect I’m having on a battle. If it’s a big event quest and thirty players are bunched up on a boss, there are so many arrows and fireballs and mystical bits of energy flying around that I have a hard time keeping track of exactly what’s going on. This sensation is fading somewhat as I continue to play and learn how all the skills interrelate, but it’s still there.

Despite that, even in my early twenties, I feel like I’m still opening the lid of an enormous toy box as I unlock more Guardian skills. I’ll have to wait and see, once the feeling fades, if all the toys I pull out are equally fun to use.

A Sense of Adventure

This game is absolutely gorgeous. The armor sets, the environments, the inventory and crafting menus, everything is beautifully tied together with a painterly style and wildly creative fantasy designs. The mini-map too. Maybe that’s a weird thing to call out, but it’s a functional piece of art always visible on the bottom of the screen that shows all the necessary information without ever being intrusive, and can be easily zoomed in and resized. In combination with the overworld map and on-screen notifications of events, it makes it easy to access Guild Wars 2’s content without wasting time.

Performance so far has been excellent at maxed out settings. Though I’ve been using pretty powerful machines (actually two, both with single GTX 580s), they’re by no means top of the line, and even in during events and the few big World versus World fights I’ve gotten into, the framerate hasn’t suffered significantly. Cranking up the settings really makes a difference, too, because the spectacle of Guild Wars 2’s visuals really adds to the powerful sense of adventure and discovery the game conjures.

The zone maps are huge, and it routinely feels like just over the next ridge is yet another pocket of marvelously crafted architecture to take in. From the lazy spin of a brightly colored windmill overlooking the rolling hills of Gendarran Fields to the dense clusters of rusted, spiky construction equipment in the Bloodcliff Quarry area of Diessa Plateau, ArenaNet’s artists really went overboard in the best possible way.

Even the elements common to many fantasy games, such as a seaside town, ArenaNet delivered with a signature style. The main cities are stunning, and Lion’s Arch in particular is achingly pretty. It’s the kind of thing that redeems some of the dull qualities of the Norn storyline, because the inspired architecture says so much more about the world and its inhabitants than a few stale lines of voice acting ever could. I know I can always return to this place and see players clustered around crafting stations, running between portals and hopping up its dizzying network of crisscrossing wooden walkways to reach vista points. It gives me a comforting sense that even when I’m surrounded by hostiles and near death, I can still return to a safe, beautiful place to relax, unwind, and craft a hamburger and cup of potato fries.

Though it may seem somewhat arbitrary, it’s so important for an MMO to make players excited about gathering together doing things like dancing on the dome of Lion’s Arch’s exquisitely designed fountain. Without it an interest in behavior the that has no impact on gameplay, social ties suffer, the feeling of community disintegrates, and ultimately the cities could feel more like museums than populated spaces. So far it feels like people aren’t spending time in the city only because it’s a convenient crafting hub and nexus of travel, but because they want to. Hopefully that stays consistent in the coming weeks, and isn’t purely driven by a fleeting sense of wonder.

For now it’s yet another reason why playing Guild Wars 2 is exciting, because so much of the world is feels unique. The thought of logging in again and continuing to explore remains powerfully motivating because the discoveries feel so significant, so worthwhile, and ideally that feeling will remain as I venture into higher level zones. So far, Guild Wars 2 is one of the most exhaustingly detailed fantasy worlds I’ve yet seen, not only because of the sheer volume of content, but because so much thought was put into every single piece.

Into the Dungeons

What a difference a dungeon makes. I was complaining a bit before that it’s tough to get a sense of how you’re affecting a fight while taking part in large-scale events. That sense was shredded to tiny, near-invisible bits as I stepped into the Ascalonian Catacombs. This dungeon doesn’t unlock until level 30, so any who enter already have a pretty good feel for their class anyway, but throughout the few hours I spent slashing and dying and casting and dying and then dying again, I felt I learned more about the Guardian’s skills and how they’re best used together than I had the entirety of the prior leveling experience.

Initially it was total chaos. First off, our group had connection issues as we tried to hop between overflow servers and home servers in order to all arrive in the Catacombs. Once that hassle was all sorted out, we set out to take down the first few enemies. I expected them to be pushovers. They wiped our entire group in seconds. They were not trash mobs in the traditional sense, they were lethal, aggressive, and difficult to predict.

I’m still getting a sense of how the aggro mechanics work, but mobs would often switch their focus instead of stick to certain targets. The result was all in the group had to stay mobile, watch for incoming attacks, and always have a dodge ready to jump out of the way of a mace swing or magical area of effect blast. The enemies also hit hard, really hard. Even minor enemies were capable of two or three-shotting my level 30 Guardian. I quickly learned that standing still was guaranteed death, much like sloppy dodge resource management.

For a moment I panicked. I brought up my skill menu with a sense of hopelessness, because the servers were going down for maintenance in two hours and at the initial rate of progress, clearing the dungeon would probably take five. I experimented, and after a while the usefulness of certain skills I’d been ignoring while leveling became apparent. Crowd control became paramount. Being able to root an enemy even for a few seconds had a very noticeable effect on my ability to survive. Swapping weapon sets so I could adjust my role as a ranged caster to an up-close damage dealer had huge benefits. The comfortable rhythm of combat I’d fallen into while completing events and heart quests was completely disrupted, and seemed by comparison like I’d been playing with training wheels on the whole time.

What really impressed me was how so many of the encounters require different approaches. For one early fight against enemy melee fighters, I switched to a two-handed sword so I could quickly leap in, drop an area of effect buff, perform a spinning attack and then dodge back out before taking too much damage. While at a distance I healed up (using a skill that also healed group members), summoned a spectral bow to help nullify conditions, triggered group regeneration with another skill, then leapt back in to continue dealing damage. I watched the enemy’s weapon as it rose up into the air, and timed my next dodge so I was in the clear just before it was slammed down. I used the entirety of my skill bar regularly, and felt an immense sense of accomplishment after every kill, because the degree of challenge made it feel like I’d earned my victory.

Later I was forced to completely switch skills. Three ranged enemies fired projectiles at our group from a distance, and their powerful knockback ensured nobody could fight at close-range for very long. I was forced to switch away from my two-handed sword to a scepter, which gave me a ranged magical attack. I also had to change my utility skills so that instead of heals and buffs, I could activate temporary shields that blocked and even reflected projectiles, giving our group some cover to hide behind while focus-firing.

Those were just fights against basic enemies. The bosses, as expected, had more sophisticated mechanics. One teleported around the battlefield, so that I often had to switch weapon sets to effectively deal damage from range and up close. Another pair of bosses had to be kept away from one another, requiring our group split up to keep the bosses at opposite sides of the battle arena. One of these bosses spawned magical minions that dealt heavy damage, so I switched to a staff weapon that allowed me to run around while casting a damaging AoE blast, as well as trigger several types of heals to help out the rest of my group.

Because anyone can resurrect during combat, it’s not too difficult to keep a boss fight going without a health bar reset. And as far as I could tell, as long as someone stays in the fight, it’s also possible to respawn at a nearby waypoint and run back to battle and keep the battle going. I’m assuming with more practice it’ll be possible to avoid frequent death and the associated repair costs, but the multiple ways to bypass a full wipe serves as an example that, despite the seemingly steep learning curve, there’s still some forgiveness to the combat system.

The more I learn about the skill system and experiment with its applications, the better it seems. While the chaos of outdoor world events sometimes overshadow the intricacies of the skill system, the tightly controlled dungeon environments show just how well the system is designed, and how heavily dependent on twitch skill and proper preparation success can be.